The man behind OHNZ

Back then every frame mattered. There was no screen on the back of the camera politely informing you that you'd completely messed up the exposure. One simply pressed the shutter and hoped for the best.

Then came the school darkroom — part classroom, part refuge, part social club for teenagers avoiding daylight and responsibility. It was there amongst trays of chemicals, enlargers and the smell of fixer that photography became something more than just taking pictures. It became addictive.

That obsession eventually led to a rare place at the School of Design in Wellington. Around the same time my Uncle Don, who travelled regularly to China in the early 1980s, offered to bring back a camera if I could somehow scrape together the money. After an impressive amount of lawn mowing, odd jobs and youthful financial sacrifice, I handed over $500 with only one instruction: "It has to be a Nikon."

He returned with the very first release of the Nikon FM2 fitted with a Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 lens.

At the time I knew very little about cameras, but that changed fairly quickly when I arrived at photography class and discovered nobody in New Zealand had actually seen one in person before. Apparently I'd unintentionally acquired something rather special. It remains the best $500 I've ever spent and, despite being rebuilt a couple of times over the decades, I still occasionally take it into the field as a reminder that good photography begins long before the shutter is pressed.

Naturally, a career in advertising followed design school and photography slowly drifted into the background while creativity found other outlets. Cameras still travelled with me, but mostly to document family life and the chaos of children growing up rather than chasing landscapes deep in the backcountry.

Then mirrorless cameras arrived.

More specifically, Fujifilm.

A trip to New York with a little Fujifilm X30 quietly reignited the spark and before long I found myself once again obsessing over light, weather, composition and the increasingly questionable decisions photographers make in pursuit of an image.

Today Christopher shoots primarily with the Fujifilm X-T5 — a camera perfectly suited to long days in the New Zealand backcountry. Compact enough to disappear into a tramping pack yet carrying enough resolution, clarity and Fujifilm colour science to capture the atmosphere and emotion of the landscape without compromise.

Based in Nelson, New Zealand, where mountains, rivers, forests and coastlines are all within striking distance, Christopher now spends much of his spare time escaping the advertising world and heading deep into the wilderness searching for those rare moments where light, weather and landscape briefly align.

Not necessarily to capture a perfect image.

But hopefully to capture the feeling of being there.